Lena Dunham's Obama Ad Wants to Piss You Off

We told ourselves we'd stay away from the endorsement ads. There's really nothing as boring as watching a celebrity recuse his or her personality to show support for a candidate in the acceptable format of election talking points. But a couple ads this year have forced us to watch more closely: First, one from Jay-Z that stepped back from his musical identity at the same time it cannily twinned his personal narrative with Barack Obama's, which seemed to say something not only about hip-hop's lack of desire to shock as of late, but its inability to shock.

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Now there is Lena Dunham. Not content to acquit herself in the usual gravely important manner of most political ads, sure. Intent on making her video about her style of comedy, her very un-Obama personal narrative of bad dates and awkward confessions. In other words, all about her. Yes. In that way, this ad fits very comfortably in the Lena Dunham canon. But that's also what makes it worth watching, at least until the setup about her "first time" with Obama becomes a little too pat an explanation of the powers of citizenship. It's the throwaway suggestive jokes in the middle that make the ad stand out, the lines making conservatives and anyone else who's made uncomfortable by Dunham's intentionally uncomfortable humor a little angry. "You wanna do it with a great guy… You wanna do it with a guy who brought the troops home from Iraq." Sorry, that's just funny.